Jersey is the most beautiful of islands but, let’s be honest, it’s a bit Wicker Man.  I feel like I am in a 1970’s time-warp. Even my beloved and essential iPhone is rendered useless by a lack of suitable networks. No voice, no data, no life.
I was mooching through Sainsbury’s wine section looking for something interesting to go with a pork chop dish I have been working on. I have to say it was a pretty depressing mooch, with very little to trouble the adrenalinometer. Rescue came in a bottle of Casillero del Diablo Carménère, a wine I have tried before and enjoyed. It is from Chilean giant, Concha y Toro, the one brand that seems truly capable of producing wines that rise above the lowest common denominator of the North American and Australian market leaders.
Hotel restaurants always give me a slight sinking feeling. Reminders of 1980s boil in the bag meals; they always smell of stale cooking, probably because breakfast buffets are when they get 90% of their traffic.
The Hotel Russell probably counts early risers 99% of its clientele. It’s easier to get a table at The Ivy than a breakfast table here. Dinner, however, was predictably quiet. A few lonely foreign travellers and one table of two couples from Yorkshire who were asking for more gravy – gravy shortages are punishable by death north of Watford Gap.
Tonight I am drinking Terrazas de los Andes Reserva Malbec 2006. A very nice wine and worth every penny of the £8.50 I paid Costco for it.
This is one of the staples of the Gaucho Grill wine list, but when average wine markups in the UK are between 100 and 200% (i.e. double to three times the wholesale price) how come Gaucho thinks it can charge £37.50, a 341% uplift, and that is against the RETAIL price. Is this a new British and Commonwealth record?
Where did all the money go then? In my quest to account for some of the missing credit crunch trillions, once believed to have been squirreled away by bankers, I spotted that £7 billion has been invested in the search for Higgs Boson – the clitoris of particle physics.
But last September, the Large Hadron Collider hit technical snags and some magnets over-heated bringing the search to a premature climax with helium gushing out all over the place.
I’ve got my comeuppance for slagging off Mark Hughes. Man City announced that the UEFA Cup quarter final home leg would be a “reward for the fans” and tickets were priced at only £5 so “ordinary fans” could come and watch. I am obviously not an ordinary fan since, despite numerous calls to the ticket office (engaged tone) the match is sold out and I have to watch on some backwater internet channel. Shame – I am in Manchester on 16 April when the town turns into a Hamburger for a night.
So perhaps I should be more complimentary about people I have never met.
Everyone knows that it is impossible to mass produce and mass market a decent wine – especially a Pinot Noir. Trouble is, nobody told Alfred Hurtado. His Chilean Cono Sur brand is taking over the world and rightly so.
The primary responsibility of a wine producer is to make drinkable or, better still, remarkable wine. It is a bit like a restaurant whose benchmark is firstly decent food, then cool atmosphere, warm ambience, decent price, and finally how good looking the waitresses are – oh and the quality and price of the wine list helps!
Fundamentally I care about our planet and I am very much in favour of reduced carbon emissions. Irrespective of whether you believe the global warming doom mongerers, you would have to be a nincompoop of Victorian standards not to accept that pumping out all this shit into our precious H2O is simply a route to premature apocalypse.
However, is there really a need to shout so loud about your green credentials? I expect as a matter of course that winemakers use ever more green and efficient production methods. So I am always suspicious about any product that claims to be “greener” – it is the Toyota Prius effect applied to the wine industry.
This “green” one from Virgin at £8.99 wasn’t undrinkable but it was unremarkable.
At some point in your life, birthdays stop being beacons shining light on a promising future and instead become lamp posts illuminating yesterday’s gloomy streets. A time to look back longingly at your youth and wonder what might have happened if you hadn’t bought that Ford Escort with the faulty brakes, or kissed that fat bird with dentures behind the bike sheds at school.
But the lacerations eventually healed and I was able once again to enjoy eating the sweets of my generation without the nightmare of that mousetrap snog to haunt my tongue.
Smoky, moody, deep, mysterious, bitter, fruity. All adjectives that, I have been instructed to inform you in no uncertain terms, do not associate themselves readily with my wife. At least not for 25 days of every month.
Just as well she didn’t visit the Virgin Wines website and pay £5.65 of her hard earned cash for this Adobe Cabernet.
So, Naked Wines has launched and as the website quips “Rules:Â Nudity Optional” but this looks like a serious undertaking to me.
You may recall that Rowan Gormley described it as the LastFM of wine shopping, but there has been some controversy over the half launch of Naked Wines, the latest project from the former founder and MD of Virgin Wines. Its aim is to match wine makers to buyers directly (well via Naked Wines to be precise). True to his irreverent style, Mr Gormley claims that winemakers “would rather be with their vines than in a Travelodge waiting for an appointment with Tesco”. This is what the internet was invented for. Look at the effect it has had on auctions, travel agents, banks, electrical stores, estate agents, bookstores. The internet is the world’s cyber-wholesale Exchange & Mart.
On the other hand, orders still need to be processed, the wine still needs to be shipped, local duty accounted for, customer service delivered, refunds processed. In this sense, is Naked Wines really so different from other online wine retailers?
I was invited to join the “tasting panel” and three bottles arrived in the post a few days later. I was expecting some yawningly predictable staples: a Petit Chablis, an Aussie Shiraz and a NZ Sauvignon for example. In fact I got a South African Chenin, a Chilean Cabernet/Carmenère and a Spanish erm….thing. My interest is aroused but I can assure you I was fully clothed as I tasted the first two – both reds.
Stumble It!